Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities

⚡️ 9 Quotes from the book

“Growth is an omnipresent protean reality of our lives: a marker of evolution, of an increase in size and capabilities of our bodies as we reach adulthood, of gains in our collective capacities to exploit the Earth’s resources and to organize our societies in order to secure a higher quality of life.”

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“Nothing has embodied this reality and hope during recent decades as prominently as the growth in the number of transistors and other components that we have been able to emplace on a silicon wafer.”

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“Before it is too late, we should embark in earnest on the most fundamental existential (and also truly revolutionary) task facing modern civilization, that of making any future growth compatible with the long-term preservation of the only biosphere we have.”

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“Perhaps the most remarkable attribute of natural growth is how much diversity is contained within the inevitable commonality dictated by fundamental genetic makeup, metabolic processes, and limits imposed by combinations of environmental factors.”

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“Of course, the functioning of living systems (be they rain forests or human bodies) depends on assemblages of microbial species (microbiomes), and the numbers of bacteria, archaea, and microscopic fungi in a unit mass of forest will be vastly larger than the total of the smallest functional components in a unit mass of even the most complicated machine.”

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“The basic dynamics of population growth is simple. Natural increase (growth of a population) is the difference between natality and mortality and these vital statistics are expressed as births and deaths per 1,000 people. But their dominant levels, prolonged trends, or relatively sudden shifts result from complex interplays of factors ranging from nutrition and life expectancy to economic status and attitudes to marriage and family.”

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“We have preferred to concentrate disproportionately on multiplying the destructive capacities of our weapons and, even more so, on enlarging our abilities for the mass-scale acquisition and storage of information and for instant telecommunication, and have done so to an extent that has become not merely questionable but clearly counterproductive in many ways.”

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“And yet, the biosphere’s indispensability and degradation are not among the concerns of those introducing ever-larger information flows and ever-faster communication and they are never mentioned in the Kurzweilian promise of infinite growth.”

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“I believe that a fundamental departure from the long-established pattern of maximizing growth and promoting material consumption cannot be delayed by another century and that before 2100 modern civilization will have to make major steps toward ensuring the long-term habitability of its biosphere.”

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